History, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution in Massachusetts.

J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

As I dug into the story of the Rev. John Morrison this week, I ended up using this helpful page of downloads from the state of New Hampshire. It offers the complete forty-volume set of New Hampshire State Papers as PDF files. The downloads aren’t swift, but the files load quickly considering how many pages they contain.

No one’s done a transcription of these volumes yet, so their text isn’t searchable like the volumes on Google Books or other web-based resources. But you can identify what pages to study from other people’s footnotes (as I did) or from the downloadable unified index for all volumes. The series contains thousands of pages of colonial and Revolutionary records that remained in the state archives. Read free or die.